


lookin' like a snack (cake)

by sadlikeknives



Category: Kate Daniels - Ilona Andrews
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:53:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27954194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sadlikeknives/pseuds/sadlikeknives
Summary: It took Barabas a while to figure it out, because he wasn't used to not being taken seriously.
Relationships: Barabas Gilliam/Christopher Steed
Comments: 4
Kudos: 35
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	lookin' like a snack (cake)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anticyclone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anticyclone/gifts).



It took Barabas a while to figure it out, because he wasn't used to not being taken seriously. Oh, sure, a few people, when they heard 'weremongoose' snickered, and he couldn't really blame them for that, but most people either quite sensibly focused on the 'were' and not the 'mongoose,' or had some awareness of what a mongoose actually was. Also, he mostly dealt with the higher ups within the Casino, and Ghastek and Rowena did not achieve and maintain their positions by discounting other people who had climbed to power by their own merits.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, was that he rarely thought about Christopher's connection to the Casino. For so long his past had been one giant question mark, and now it was...complicated. Christopher didn't like to talk about it. It was too ugly. The choices he made, the person he was...he wasn't that person any more. A broken thing, once mended, would never quite be the same as it was before. They talked about it once, early on, and agreed to try to leave the past in the past. He was not a good person. He was someone different now. It was really all Barabas needed to know.

So when some of the navigators from the Casino acted oddly toward Barabas, clustered in corners whispering when he was near or talking vaguely down their noses to him, they were mostly junior, anyway, and thus beneath his concern, and what he did consciously notice he didn't connect to Christopher in any way. Not until he finally had to go to the Casino on Guild business with Christopher in tow.

"You don't have to go in," he said to him as he pulled into the drive in front of the Casino.

"I think waiting in the car would look worse," Christopher said. It had surprised Barabas at first, how much he thought in terms of appearance. Most of the time he opted not to care, but he did think about it first. "And if the situation is what I think it is, I think I can contribute."

Barabas hesitated, then asked, "Is it weird?"

"I know they're there," he said without hesitation, understanding the question immediately, "but I can't feel them. It's deeply weird. Like if you went partially blind, but all you couldn't see was...I don't know, trees." While Barabas was still contemplating that, Christopher got out of the car, then looked over his shoulder for him to join him. Barabas quickly handed the keys off to the valet and told him they'll be back shortly.

The last time Christopher had entered the Casino, he had been with Kate and Curran, in a freshly tailored suit, with the wings and aspect of Deimos on full display. This time he was in jeans and a t-shirt that, like most of his clothes, had been modified for the wings, which were nowhere in evidence, leaving it looking semi-craft-project-y. Barabas had put on a suit for this meeting, but Christopher hadn't been supposed to come with him until the last minute.

Barabas didn't think Christopher's one suit would even fit at this point. He'd put on a lot of muscle in his shoulders from all the flying since it was purchased...he mentally slapped himself to stop thinking about Christopher's shoulder muscles, or about going shopping with him for a properly fitted suit, which was if anything an even more dangerous train of thought, and to start thinking about this fucking meeting, and followed him inside.

They had to cross above the 'stables' to get to Ghastek's office, a neat little bit of theater, and Barabas tried to think about it not in terms of hundreds of bloodthirsty undead directly below his feet but in terms of knowing there was a forest there but being unable to see the trees. It made the experience even more unsettling, so he packed it away, and then he barely had time to notice the odd, appraising way the journeywoman who was escorting them looked at him before they were arriving at Ghastek's door.

It turned out to be a good thing that he brought Christopher. The problem they were having turned out to not be something the People were doing on purpose, so much as a technical, magical complication so involved Ghastek at first tried to dumb it down and Barabas _still_ didn't really understand it. Christopher, of course, grasped it immediately, and he leaned forward and asked, "Why don't you just--" After that, while everyone else in the room was still (mostly) speaking English, it became a matter of Barabas understanding at least half of the words individually but not at all in combination, so he just sat back to watch the show.

Ghastek got very excited and brought in Rowena, and then a couple of other navigators. One of them brought a stack of books, some of which looked very old. Diagrams got involved. At one point Christopher did remember Barabas and looked over, apologetic, and Barabas waved him off: _Go on_. He was solving the problem, and Barabas would clearly be no help whatsoever. Besides, he liked watching him like this, in his element. It wasn't something he usually got to see. Barabas was far from stupid, but he'd known for a long time--it felt like since before they left Europe, although he knew that was his brain retroactively editing things to be rosier than they had been--that Christopher was the smartest person he'd ever met, and in his specific area of knowledge? Forget about it.

The others were experts in their field. Christopher had them all blown completely out of the water, and they knew it.

Being pushed to the outside, he could observe, and not just Christopher--they were, after all, in the belly of the beast here, alliance or no. Gradually, he realized that weren't just in something like well-deserved awe of Christopher, they were actually still afraid of him. It made sense. Even with all his magic tied up in Deimos, chained into making him something new, he was still dangerous. He knew things about most of them that they wouldn't want known.

This was why Roland had done it, Barabas thought. All of this, right here, was why he had tried to make Christopher something he could enslave. It's a piece of luck he thinks himself so clever: if he was really smart he would have just killed him.

There was an odd moment when someone came to take coffee orders and asked Christopher if his...friend wanted anything instead of asking Barabas directly. It caught Christopher off guard, too, and he looked startled and then almost guilty before directing the apprentice to the person he should be talking to. It's confusing enough--the phrasing, the hesitance, the way the man skipped over Barabas entirely; Ghastek looked ready to spit nails and he had no doubt the apprentice was going to be in some kind of trouble as soon as they left--that Barabas started looking at the whole picture and realized he'd been missing something all along, something in the way the navigators look at him, or...no. At him in relation to Christopher, maybe?

That was it, he realized. The odd looks, the dismissiveness some of them showed him, none of that had started until the denizens of the Casino had come to know that Christopher who lived in Barabas' house was Christopher Steed, twenty-second Legatus of the Gold Legion. But they obviously took _Christopher_ seriously--deeply so--so...oh.

Oh, it was that, wasn't it?

He shifted his weight and Christopher looked over at him, raised one pale eyebrow, asking silently if everything was okay, and Barabas just shook his head, _Don't worry about it_. He could tell him later, in the car, when they could laugh over it, because it was hilarious. In the meantime, he was rearranging some things in his head, acknowledging that he'd been doing Christopher a disservice by not thinking about his past and wondering vaguely if the massive respect and vague fear the People still had for him was something they could use, although obviously that part was something he would have to talk to Christopher about.

On the way out, as if the universe just wanted to throw a little bit more confirmation at him, he actually overheard a cluster of journeymen and -women gossiping about him: they didn't like his hair, but they agreed that he was generally 'twinky' enough for Steed's type, horror of horrors. Barabas knew he still fit the general aesthetic, but he'd aged out of his twink phase years ago.

In the car, once they were a safe distance from the Casino, Christopher said, "Okay, out with it."

Barabas considered several ways to phrase it, and finally settled upon, "Do you have a thing for twinks?" Christopher knocked his head back against the headrest: once, then again. "Is that a yes?"

"I told you," Christopher said. "I was not a nice person."

"Chris, even if you fucked every twink in--where did you live before, anyway?"

"Iowa."

" _Iowa_ ," Barabas repeated with horror, and then soldiered on. "Even if you fucked every twink in Iowa, it wouldn't have any bearing on your morality or lack thereof, far as I'm concerned. I'm a bouda, you know that, right?"

"How about, I fucked a lot of twink necromancers who thought they could use me to further their ambitions."

"Did it?"

"No," Chris said, sounding scandalized. "Of course not." Barabas had to work to keep from laughing, because of course it hadn't. "I let them think it would," Chris admitted, looking out the passenger window.

"Yeah, that's not great."

"I know. I told you. I was not a nice person. And stupid and pretty is a combination that usually meant they wouldn't try to assassinate me in bed. Usually." He rubbed at his forehead. He looked and sounded tired. Maybe talking about his past was not such a good idea. "Landon got pretty desperate there toward the end."

What the hell. "Did that...did that happen a lot?"

Christopher said in a very flat voice, "Officially, rank within the Masters of the Dead is assessed by range, and by climbing the Ladder of Knowledge. Unofficially, once you reach the very top, that system goes by the wayside and ascent becomes a matter of taking out the person ahead of you by whatever means are necessary. Roland encourages this, as it means there's little in the way of cooperation and alliance among his top necromancers, so no one gets too comfortable or too powerful." Barabas had sort of known that: he remembered Christopher mentioning that he'd killed someone named Morgan to become Legatus, once. He just hadn't thought too hard on the implications of that statement. Landon Nez, though, had been Legatus since Christopher was removed from the post, and Barabas said so. Christopher said coolly, "Landon Nez is a useful idiot," and for a moment, Barabas was sitting next to the man he'd once been. It was not a comfortable experience. Then his shoulders slumped and he asked, "What did you--did someone say something in there?"

Barabas kept his tone very light as he said, "Apparently a bunch of journeymen agree I'm twinky enough for you."

"They don't even know we're..." Christopher trailed off, reluctant to put a name to something that was so new, so fragile that they hadn't even told Barabas' parents yet.

"No, but you live in my house and that seems to be enough for them to gossip about it."

"They do love to gossip. I don't miss that." One thing the mercenaries had going for them was that they were mostly disinterested in anyone else's private life. 

"Or the assassination attempts."

"Or that. But also, no twink could wear that suit like that," Christopher protested.

"I know!" They were, for a moment, exasperated and gay at each other, and it was great. Then Barabas said, "Hey. How about we go home and I can show you how great I look out of this suit?"

"I have, in fact, graduated from twinks," Christopher said, amusement sparking in his eyes.

"And I've graduated from being a twink, so that works out."

"You were never a twink."

"Oh, I assure you, I very much was."

"Okay, yeah," Christopher agreed. "I can definitely see it. Just the kind with razor blades hidden inside."

"Exactly."

They grinned at each other for a long moment, since traffic wasn't moving so Barabas had no need to keep his eyes on the road, and then Christopher asked, "You were saying something about your suit?"

"What if we abandon the car and you fly us home?"

"Barabas."

"It would be way faster."

"We have to go back to the Guild first anyway."

"Being a functioning adult _sucks_. I want to go back to being a twink." College Barabas had had _a lot_ of fun. Of course, he'd also already been ambitious, with the high grades to match. College Barabas hadn't slept much. It was a trade off.

"No, you don't." Christopher reached over and patted his knee, and Barabas glared at the mule-drawn cart in front of them. "We'll be home eventually."

"And then something will happen involving creme filling?"

"Might be able to be arranged. Hey--" Barabas hurried to take advantage of the opening gap Christopher had been in the process of pointing out. Now they were getting somewhere. For a day that had involved a trip to the Casino, it was looking to turn out pretty great after all.


End file.
